In epistemology there has been a great turnaround in the 20th century. Before there still was some kind of confidence in the capability of finding the truth. In the 20th century this belief was broken with. The human being feels itself as separated from truth, or as a being in a world where truth doesn’t exist at all. Not everyone is a philosopher, so not everyone thinks about these questions. But the world of thought is something universal, and what is being thought is in a way the property of everybody. So we go to school, maybe to high school and to university – and we are being taught that truth doesn’t exist, or that it is something that is not in reach of the human being. The only temporal truth there is, is the science that is formed by evidence through experiments. Evidence based science we call it, and it is temporally true, because there always can come proof that the truth we had is not true.
In fields where it is not possible to get this evidence by experiment – in spiritual science for instance – there actually couldn’t be any truth at all. There are some spiritual masters that we seem to have to believe – which is quite a different thing from truth based on evidence by experiments. So how did this turnaround work in societies that want to find spiritual science? Of course we would like to give the immediate answer: they still believe that truth exists. And maybe they say they do. But in this other layer of consciousness, where the philosophical thoughts work without being acknowledged, there entered a deep lack of faith in the all-impregnating truth, and the capability of the human being to perceive truth.
The ‘common sense’-philosophy entered in spiritual societies. Two know more than one. Three know more than two. Four know more than three … and so on. Truth becomes a new face, the face of understanding each other. And it sounds marvelous, it sounds like an evocation to holiness. The egoism of having the truth in the I is no longer the purpose, but the altruism of understanding everything. Each human being has a part of the whole truth, all beings together have the whole truth.
This is one of the concepts that are the most difficult to disguise. It is founded on something that people like very much, that sounds like pure altruism. Still it isn’t – how to make that clear to yourself and to others?
In social life we certainly need this understanding more than anything else in the world. There, where people are equal, we will have to learn to understand each other, even when we see things that are disgusting for us. The duty of trying to understand has to do with our feeling life. We have to learn to play a beautiful harmony in this feeling life with each other, even when it is inevitable that there is dissonance now and then. In the dissonance we even need to find the glory of harmony. So where we are feeling subjects we are equal subjects and we can learn to understand everything. From this feeling level we can even understand strange opinions and judgements. We don’t have to accept them, but we can understand them. Religious ideas that we don’t share – we can understand them. It is a kind of horizontal form of being in which we take and give, give and take feelings. And feelings can always be understood.
But there is another level in finding the truth, where equality is not the right concept – which I will try to describe next week.
Because certainly not everyone reads the comments I am giving a link from one of the comments of last week about music:
Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music
Understanding by Mieke Mosmuller
